Monthly Archives: September 2015

In simple terms, ‘flat’ design gives an impression of elements lying flat on a surface as it doesn’t use 3D impressions such as glow effects and gradients. With minimalism being the talk of the town, flat design has become almost synonymous with the term ‘good design’. However, with websites increasingly embracing this ‘flat’ approach, it’s becoming harder to distinguish one brand from the other.

Rumor has it that micro-blogging site Twitter invented Vine to encourage creativity among its users, but marketers were quick to lap the idea up. These micro-video apps soon took the cyber world by storm and why not? It’s creative, it’s crisp and it’s fun, too! Vine’s short span makes it fit for social-media sharing with its loop mechanism ensuring that you can watch a video a number of times before hitting the ‘off’ button.

Remember playing Super Mario Bros on your Nintendo back in the 90s? It brings back the memories of those days when you were an expert in running through the Mushroom Kingdom, fearlessly flattening one Goomba after another, doesn’t it? Interestingly, this iconic and revolutionary arcade game was one of the first to use a design technique that is a rage these days.

When an application is moved to the Web, the process also involves transitioning the application programming interface (API) along with it. However, there had been a downside until recently. Traditionally, APIs were built around a remote procedure call (RPC) in order to make these interfaces look and feel like functions.

Back in May this year, Google announced the arrival of its Places Application Program Interface or Places API. It is developed over and above the existing 100 million places around the globe that are already stored in Google’s database. Although the Places API is already available as a web service, its inclusion in developing iOS and Android native apps in recent months has greatly enhanced the overall user experience (UX) by utilizing the location signals of mobile devices.

When you access myriad websites from your desktop, tablet or smart phone, do you ever wonder how these sites are storing and recovering information on your devices? Well, without giving you any inkling these web cookies or small data files that most websites use to store and remember the browsing history of a user, actually fetch data back from your PC or phone whenever required.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow is slated to release in the next few weeks but it’s too early to ditch what we have in hand right now – Android Lollipop. Spanning between versions 5.0 and 5.1.1, Lollipop has been a breath of fresh air especially for mobile developers with bundles of new features, and over 5,000 newly included Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to be used by applications.

New ideas are constantly evolving when it comes to website design. In 2014, use of minimalistic colors, flat design, three-dimensional transition effects and background videos were popular. This year responsive website design trendshas gained more significance, and if you are considering designing a new website or making it mobile-friendly, you are treading the right path.

Your online store is like a needle in a haystack, with thousands of competitors offering similar products and services. In order to stand out from the crowd, you need an e-commerce solution that lets you fully customize the look and feel of your website. Drupal Commerce, an open source e-commerce software with more than 53,000 active users, has grown in strength and size to support both big brands and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) by individualizing their Drupal-based online stores.

According to a research report by consulting major PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a business model dependent on and favoring digital ecosystems, sharing economy will rake up revenues up to 335 billion dollars by 2025. Well, going by the behavior of today’s consumers, especially the millennial generation (people in 18-34 years age-group) that are increasingly embracing peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as Uber and Airbnb, we can certainly say that a paradigm shift has occurred in the financial sector – Bye bye brand monopoly, sharing economy is here to stay.